Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions is a collection of essays by a group of scholars, which examine Breuer’s approach and way of working, his strategies and his signature buildings. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, which are now accessible online.

Often seen as a pioneer of a “brutalist modernism” of reinforced concrete, Marcel Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked. More recently historians, architects, and – with the reopening of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer in New York – a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned.

Breuer (1902–1981) is celebrated as an architect, furniture designer and teacher who is known as a “formgiver” of modern American architecture. Originally from Hungary, Breuer was one of the first students at the Bauhaus before he emigrated to the USA in 1937.

Edited by Barry Bergdoll, Jonathan Massey

With essays by Lucia Allais, Barry Bergdoll, Kenny Cupers with Laura Martínez de Guereñu, Teresa Harris, John Harwood, Jonathan Massey, Guy Nordenson, Timothy Rohan, and an introduction to the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University

Design: Integral Lars Müller